


Burial

by SilenceoftheSolitude



Series: The Journey [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Episode Related, F/M, Gen, Original Character(s), Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 04:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3715048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilenceoftheSolitude/pseuds/SilenceoftheSolitude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walks away and mounts her bike without looking back. She's getting better at burying the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burial

**Author's Note:**

> Be sure to read "Pretense" before you start on this one.
> 
> Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. No copyright infringement intended.
> 
> Any comment is very much appreciated.
> 
> As always, a big thank you to my wonderful beta, Kalinysta.

**The Journey**

 

 Life isn't about the final moments, it's about the journey, it's about the process. - J. Michael Straczynski

 

**Part 2: Burial**

 

 

_Some people we leave behind, and not because we wish to, but because we can't take them with us any longer and we need to forge ahead._

 

 

Her face is pale, drawn out. She doesn't remember getting up that morning, nor does she remember putting on clothes, but she has a distinct memory of a conversation with her father; she has an image in her head of him begging her to talk to him, to keep him a part of her life.

  
She finds it easier to believe the Moon shines of its own light rather than accept the fact that her father begged her to do something - whichever that might be. Jacob Carter is a good man, if a lousy parent. But then again, who is she to judge his parenting skills? It's not as if she has children of her own, and she is only fourteen, anyway.

  
Yet she stands.

  
She's still and stoic after long, restless nights spent crying silently for the things she knows she has been robbed of because of a single accident, a single event. It's a loss heavier than the one of this one person, whose death is more than enough to leave her breathless and lacking a part of herself. It's the loss of a world Sam envisioned, in which at any given turn she could share the joys and pains with her mother. It's what she represented that Sam finds she is missing most. She will never be able to replace it, and that's a truth she will have to carry with her.

  
In a while she knows she will start shaking violently again. She's been quivering and trembling one second, and stock-still the next for the past three days. She knows for a fact that she will have a breakdown any moment now, but she is reassured by the fact that only the closest family members are left to witness her raw pain.

  
After the funeral, only two cars followed the hearse to the cemetery. As a kid, the only funerals she ever saw were those seen on TV and none of them followed the Catholic rite, that's why she feels a little disorientated as she finds herself in a well-kept graveyard with only six people beside her to accompany her mother in her last journey.

  
She doesn't realize when she has to move, and no one by her side seems to want to depart either, so she thinks it's alright.

  
It's not until she can't stand anymore that she feels her father's arms lift her from the ground and place her in the front seat of the car. She is so numb she can't even put on her seatbelt. Jacob does that for her too. The roar of the engine awakens her senses and she starts crying anew.

  
Amid the tears, she can hear a broken voice she is hard-pressed to register as her own. The words are disjointed from each other, and the sentence she forms probably makes little sense to her father at first, but the mantra-like way in which she keeps repeating it finally drives her point across.

  
"I don't want to leave her. I don't want to move on."

  
Her father has always been awkward with displays of emotional pain; he has never known how to deal with them. It was usually Sam's mother that knew what to do and what to say. But she's not here to console her, so in the end Jacob resolves to shut the engine and envelop her in his strong arms. He whispers soothingly in her ear too and she thinks that, despite the close quarters of the car, neither her grandpa nor Mark hear his words.

  
"Me neither, kiddo. But she would."

  
Sam leaves her mother's body in that casket and often goes back to visit her grave, but she always keeps the memories alive in her mind, and in the end it's her father, she knows, who suffers the most.

  
From the day he laid eyes on Sam's mother, Jacob Carter has never loved anyone else, and Sam knows that though everyone else moved on, even if only partially, Jacob has never left that grave behind, not when he was a thousand miles away, and certainly not when he was thousands of light years distanced from that grey stone with a framed, black and white picture of a smiling woman.

 

* * *

 

  
  
From across the room she sees him. His hands tucked safely away in his pants' pockets. He is as still as anything she has ever seen.

  
His eyes are just the same green as she remembers seeing that first day. She was inexperienced if fierce, she was scared if determined. And from across an airstrip she saw two jaded rings enclose an iris as black as coal; the emotion there, the assuredness mingled with vitality and a touch of experience that a man that had yet to hit his thirties shouldn't possess, which startled her. She isn't startled anymore now as she watches him from across the room.

  
It's been a couple of years since she has last seen him, but he hasn't changed much and his look, the one he developed after they became as thick as thieves, is still there. Just for her. His little sister.

  
His head slowly moves towards the sliding glass door and she precedes him outside. Nobody pays them any attention as they distance themselves from the reception hall and make their way into the back garden, damp from the rain that only just let up.

  
She didn't see him at the service, but she knows that's probably because he was closer to the first rows than she even thought of going. She knew Dunn only for a year before she was reassigned and the only reason she came to the awards ceremony, she thinks, is because she was in town and she knew that she would meet friends she lost contact with. She thinks she is a little selfish, but she can't conjure up either the pride or the interest she sees reflected in the eyes around her.

  
As they near the far side of the garden and are finally out of sight from anyone that should decide to take a peek outside the window, she allows herself to look into those green orbs she has missed so much.

  
He is as tall as she remembers him being - not basketball player-tall, but enough that she has to lift her head a bit even on her low heels to catch his eyes. He has a faraway look about him and he still hasn't watched her directly since they stepped outside and she is reminded that he never liked to share his troubles, but never could quite manage to hide them either.

  
Seeing him so still it's hard to remember why they call him 'Flash'. There is an unnatural immobility about him that she would have never associated with the vibrant man he is, and she remembers the day news came of his father's death. Somehow she thinks Dunn's getting an award is not the reason for his troubles.

  
Her hand reaches unconsciously for his and she tangles her fingers with his unresponsive ones. It's only as she tightens her hold that he seems to come alive and responds to her presence.

  
She entertained the idea of thinking of him as more than just a friend, but she quickly thought better than to act on that possibility once she realized that if the distance wasn't enough, she had never once looked at him with the desire of a lover, not even that first day when his eyes had been a sparkling light of hope, a promise of support that didn't demand anything in return.

  
Matt has always been steadfast and reliable, a mainstay in the storm that was Sam's personal life, which is why, when he looks at her like he doesn't know who he is anymore, she is a little frightened to discover that even anchors can get rusty and break.

  
She is sure she is missing vital information and is scared to ask because it would mean that she let him down, that she forgot about him too, and she hates herself for caring more about an alien device than about the man that stood by her, as Mark should have when she received an award for her work in the Gulf War, proud and cheerful, by her side.

  
There, if nothing else.

  
"They took my wings."

  
He says it so softly her mind takes a while to adjust to the idea.

  
She wants to ask why, how, when. But she stays silent and envelopes him in her arms. She notes the slight twitch of his left hand, the fact that it doesn't seem to be moving as well as Matt would want it to; from that she surmises he was in an accident, something bad enough that he won't regain full mobility.

  
She's glad he is alright, still with her, solid in her arms.

  
She knows what not being a pilot means to Matt. His whole identity has been built on the basis of being a flyboy, his whole childhood he spent dreaming of reaching the sky; his whole career he spent with crazy music cranked up on the radio as adrenaline rushed him through enemy lines and his commander's voice told him to "get out of there. Fast!" He has nothing else but his plane and his childhood dream, and although his mother might be relieved because he is no longer in danger, she will certainly regret the event once she realizes the light has left her boy's eyes.

  
Sam buries Flash that day, but doesn't resign herself to losing Matt too.

 

* * *

  
  
There is no body to collect when Jonas falls through the Stargate to die against the iris, and to remember the day and her previous life with him she only has a Bible with her own scribbled handwriting on it.

  
There are many reasons why it's a bad day. She just realized that she can't kill a man point blank to save her life, and though she has participated in a couple of firefights since joining the SGC and has killed more than one man when she was a pilot in the Gulf War, she understands that there's a big difference between those situations and the one she has just found herself into. She has never had to stare into anybody’s eyes when taking a kill shot.

  
She still sees them, though. Jonas' eyes. Burnt into her memory.

  
She also realizes that although her Commanding Officer has the utmost confidence in her abilities as a scientist and trusts her enough to bring her on missions, he draws a line between them as soldiers. He can be ruthless and cold, he can kill a man point blank and not blink. She can't.

  
He knows Teal'c can and will do it too, if the time comes. He knows what to expect from Daniel because he is a civilian and killing is not something he has been trained to do. He probably expected more from her, and she has the sinking suspicion that she did too. She went to Jonas expecting to be able to take care of him. Instead, she endangered the life of her CO because she couldn't pull the trigger.

  
Jonas' eyes rouse her from her contemplations unexpectedly. In his last hour he looked both unstable and steady. She marvels at that, at how a man can look both in control and so out-of-his-mind. She told Daniel that she has a soft spot for the lunatic fringe and it's not a lie, but it's not what her relationship with Jonas originated from either. After a life spent battling with her father for recognition after her brother left her, unable to fight the conflict she can't abandon, Jonas was the stability she needed to get through the day.

  
Ironic how, in the end, the thing that drew her to him was the one quality he was devoid of. She can't admit to the others how screwed up her personal life is, if they haven't already figured it out from her choice of fiancée. But she can admit it to herself. And for once, she does.

  
She has gone on for so long trying to get a normal life - and Jonas was a testament to that - which is why she visits his empty grave and leaves his Bible on it. He didn't get all the honors that go with being a military man; he has, after all, played god, but he had two parents who knew nothing of his extremely deranged behavior.

  
Sam doesn't really marvel that his parents didn't recognize the signs of Jonas' instability; they were the ones to raise him with certain values and parents usually have trouble finding faults in their children because it would be like admitting to a personal failure.

  
For a lingering moment she stares at the man's name engraved on the headstone, his dates of birth and death both so familiar to her. The contour of the letters and numbers on the grey rock is rough. She sees the edge of Jonas' character reflected into it and realizes she can't bring herself to remember only the bad things. He could be sweet and considerate when he wanted to.  But then again, now she can't think of him without remembering his deranged eyes, bright in the knowledge that he held power over her and over an entire planet.

  
She walks away and mounts her bike without looking back. She's getting better at burying the past.

 

* * *

  
  
The day started off as bad and only got worse as time passed. That's how she finds herself beside two of her teammates, on an alien planet, watching a ritual that she knows is incomplete because she has memories that are not her own.

  
The Tok'ra are thousands of years old; everything in their lifestyles reflect that length, but burying their dead is a process they tend to do as quickly as possible. They fear that a Goa'uld might put them into a sarcophagus and corrupt their minds to make them become as power-hungry and malevolent as the Goa'uld themselves.

  
She struggles with her grief in a way she is not sure she can handle. She wants to say if she were to lose the man she loves she would be grieving as hard as she is for the death of Martouf, but she is suffering the pain of three entities and it's harder than she thought. She isn't in love with Martouf, of that she is sure, but Jolinar and Rosha were, and she isn't without fond memories of the alien herself. She knows the only reason he clung to her was because she was the last person alive to have memories of Jolinar and Rosha and their love for him, but he was also a kind man who came to realize and recognize the difference between Major Carter and what she represented to him, a man who came to understand the difference between her and the symbiote that had inhabited her, and care for her the same way he cared for his lost love.

  
And now he is dead.

  
His body, swallowed by the event horizon, is incomplete. Lantash floats nearly lifelessly in a jar and Martouf's brain is being held for study.

  
And amidst it all, she has to come to terms with the realization that she has developed inappropriate feelings for her CO. And he reciprocates.

  
And in the end the truth is that she feels twice as guilty about it as she would any normal day, because she has lost a man who was ready to love and give himself whole to her, and she can't focus all her attention on that event. She can't focus all her pain on what should be a most important loss.

  
The only thing she is completely sure of, in this tangled state of emotional wreck that she is in, is that she needs some time to meditate. She has worked hard at the SGC for more than three years and before that, she invested two years working to invent a computer program that replaces the DHD and allowed Earth to use the device in the first place. She is due some time off.

  
She cleared it with Hammond before gating to the Tok'ra’s current base, but she hasn't said a word to the rest of the team, so when Teal'c and the Colonel are ready to leave they are both startled by the fact that she is staying. Teal'c doesn't comment - he never does - but in his eyes she sees understanding and the silent support he is so good at giving and so bad at accepting.

  
The Colonel is a close book however. She is not worried he might be feeling the sudden urge to envelop her in bubble wrap; that's not who he is and she is sure if he hasn't had the impulse for the past year (she gives those feelings that he isn't supposed to feel at least a year of age), he won't suddenly be overwhelmed by it. But she has the feeling that he is hurt, because despite the reassurance - if it is, indeed, a reassurance and not a painful knowledge - that she too feels something for him that goes beyond regulations, she is crying for the loss of another man and she is not about to tell him that she is suffering for them too. She is not about to give him hope of a 'them' that should not be there. If it helps him to get over her, who is she to take even that away from him?

  
In the end he settles for a silent nod that says to her more than any word could, and he steps in the event horizon with only Teal'c by his side.

  
Jacob is standing beside her, and he must know something is different, because his daughter hid something from her CO and his daughter never would do something like that. But, much to Sam's relief, he doesn't ask. She thinks Selmak has a very calming and sobering effect on her father. Jacob doesn't jump down her throat anymore, nor does he speak without weighing the effect his words might have on his listener.

  
Just as planned, Sam stays for two days. She is alone with her father for the entire time, but mostly she speaks with Selmak, who helps her sort through her feelings. At least now she knows the pain she feels for Martouf is real and hers, and she can differentiate between her pain and Jolinar's.

  
Her father hugs her tightly before letting go. She has revealed to him many things about the direction of her personal life. She hardly thinks he hasn't figured out that there's something not-quite appropriate going on between Sam and the Colonel, but Jacob doesn't say a word.

  
She dials Earth and punches in her GDO code. She turns one last time to bid her father farewell, and her step falters only once in the memory of the body that has been taken by the event horizon only two days before, the body she made lifeless.

  
Her team stands at the base of the ramp as she emerges on the other side of the wormhole, and Sam sense the warmth that only comes from a sense of belonging and peace. She gets the feeling that her pain isn't lost on these three men because they have suffered too - greatly and probably more than her. But it's never been a contest with them and she doesn't make it one.

  
She leaves Lantash in a tank and Martouf in the part of her brain she gifted to Jolinar in exchange for the life the Ashrak wanted to strip from Sam, but the three men in front of her make her feel like she can live on.

  
So she does.

 

* * *

  
  
There's a strange feeling encompassing Sam as she makes her way home amid the empty streets of Colorado Springs. It's a mixture of pain, grief and a good dose of loss, a sense of not knowing what she is doing or what is going to happen to her. It's as if all that has happened so far in her life is just a wacky dream she has yet to make heads or tails of.

  
She has already suffered a greater loss in her lifetime (she doesn't want to guess what happened in alternate timelines or alternate realities for now) with the death of her mother, but she can't help but being dismayed beyond what she thinks is befitting this specific bereavement. Janet was never supposed to die. Just like Sam's mother, she was supposed to be safe, if not invincible. Instead, Janet was saving a life and was robbed of hers in return.

  
And now Sam has to go home and face a girl she has always thought of as the closest thing she would get to a daughter, and to whom she has only just broken the news of her second mother's death. Cassie has always been strong, but Sam doubts she can soldier on through this news the way she did when the entire Hankan population, and Cassandra's family with it, was killed. Sam doesn't want to ask her to anyway.

  
She thinks that maybe, if six years ago she adopted Cassie for herself, now the girl wouldn't have to suffer through such a pain, but she also knows that there's no way she could have raised a little kid at the time. Leaving her alone every time Sam stepped through the 'gate without being able to reassure her of a safe comeback sounds like a cruel thing to put a young girl through, and Sam is also pretty sure that she wasn't ready to raise a child. She wasn't ready to be a mother.

  
Sam has cried enough tears on Base that she doesn't fear a meltdown in front of the girl. She has to be there for Cassie and she is not about to lay her own pain out into the open for the young woman to see. She won't mention that Colonel O'Neill nearly died too; she won't reveal any harsher truth about her state of mind to anyone, and definitely not to Cassie.

  
Sam takes a second to collect herself before stepping through the door, but her step is firm when she does. She doesn't bother to speak as she hugs Cassandra for dear life, but she takes a second to wonder what Janet would do, what she would say.  The truth is, she doesn't know and she can't even fathom it, but she decides that if she is to help Cassie, she has to try not to act like Janet, because the one thing Sam would have never wanted as a child was for someone to try and replace her own mother.

  
Sam doesn't deal with the news of her best friend's death because she is too busy trying to suppress her emotions for Cassie's sake.  In the end, she settles for blindly moving on, and it's only later that she will realize it's been a mistake that will have repercussion not only on herself, but on others too.

 

* * *

  
  
The day Jacob dies, Sam is in turmoil.

  
She stands on the back porch of O'Neill's house ready to confess him her reservations about a wedding she has so far accepted as an event that is bound to happen which, in itself, should tell her all she needs to know about her relationship with Pete. The sharp pain of finding another woman there with him, to share his charred meat, is another indication of how wrong she is in thinking she can forget her affections (and right now she isn't ready to give her feelings another more specific name) for Jack simply by distancing herself from him.

  
Now Sam is left with the unpleasant feeling of complete failure where her private life is concerned. She thinks her father foresaw the whole ordeal and, in turn, she let him die without knowing that she would, eventually, get it. Because now she really does. It was never about letting go of someone; all along, what was holding her back, was some _thing_ : her misconceptions regarding what life is about, her greatest fear - that of failure, and her need for normalcy in a world that dooms whoever isn't 'normal'. And what's worse than a woman whose only focus is her career and whose idea of fun is spending three days straight holed up in a laboratory trying to figure out an alien device?

  
General O'Neill stays with her until an urgent call drags him reluctantly away from her and Jacob's body. She is grateful for his presence a lot more than she should be and knows something is about to give.

  
She is standing in front of her father's lifeless body with no idea of what to do with her life. She would think herself crazy if she hadn't seen crazy before. Jacob always had a penchant for unsettling her, but his last words hit a little too close to the mark, and Sam has inherited enough of her father's stubbornness that she feels that the need to solve this matter is compelling. If she wants to go on with her life, she has to make radical changes - upsetting changes. And now she has enough clarity to understand that solving the situation might not literally _solve_ it, but it will undoubtedly give her some peace of mind, which is more than she has had in the past year.

  
First of all she has to call Mark, because he is her brother and he has lost his father too. She is not sure whether she should have that conversation with him while she's still on Base, but she doesn't want to delay the news, so she decides to retreat to the solitary confines of her office.

  
She doesn't meet many people on her way to the lab. Apparently the end of the world does not warrant an excessively busy SGC, but those she does encounter express their condolences with such calm and composure that she doesn't feel the overwhelming urge to break down and cry in the middle of the corridor. All of them have, at one point or another, lost someone they held dear in the incessant battle against the Goa'uld, and most people on Base knew Jacob as the one Tok'ra who they could always rely on for help.

  
Sam closes the door effectively sealing away any noise, and picks up the phone on her side desk, her fingers dialing her brother's number as they would Earth's address on the DHD.

  
After relaying the news to her distraught brother, words slip out of her mouth about something she hasn't yet realized she is going to do.

  
Mark asks her if she wants him to tell Pete for her, because, somehow, everyone seems to think that the pain she feels for the loss of Jacob is stronger than her brother's - even Mark himself - and she tells him that she doesn't think she can marry Pete. It's in no way the answer to her brother's question, and she is pretty sure they're both actually startled by the revelation. She certainly is. But now that it's out in the open, she realizes it's true and, therefore, it would be useless, if not counterproductive, to take it back now only to say it again later.

  
She waits for Mark to yell at her, or maybe to just try to sway her from her decision. Instead, she is met with a minute of silence and then a sigh. Strangely enough it doesn't sound like a display of impatience, surprise, or barely repressed anger, all of which she could have expected. She feels worse now, because she can't even seem to accept that her brother might be understanding of her choice, not even after five years of working to solidify their relationship into what it was when life wasn't so full of complications and their greatest argument was about who got to eat the last cookie.

  
"Do you want to talk about it?" he asks eventually.

  
She isn't sure what she is supposed to tell him, but she thinks she owes him at least a partial truth; she sure as hell can't tell him about the feelings she harbors for her Commanding Officer, but she can at least tell him that she never loved Pete enough to marry him. "I needed to think I was good enough to get married, but the truth is I've been kidding myself along with everyone else. And I'm sorry I'm going to hurt him, but I'd rather do it now than when it's going to wound him even more," she replies.

  
It's the longest thought she has given to her relationship with Pete, and she is somewhat startled about her voicing it to her brother so freely, but she also feels better now that she has opened up to him.

  
"Have you told him?" he asks, silently accepting her explanation.

  
"I didn't even tell Dad..."

  
Her voice breaks at that point and from there on only the sound of tears carries through the receiver. It's only later that she realizes that there's a camera in her lab and she must be giving the airmen on watch something to talk about. Truth be told, right now she doesn't much care. She just lost her father and propriety is somewhat low on her priority list, especially considering that she went through the motions of getting inside a darkened lab and closed the door firmly shut.

  
"He was a smart man, Sam, I'm confident he knew..."

  
She wants to hug Mark because Jacob did know, and his last words to her were about that, but she can't, because Mark is more than a thousand miles away and she can't beam directly into his house since he doesn't have clearance. Sometimes she hates her job.

  
By the time she hangs up the phone, the tears that smeared her face are dry, and the only sign of their previous existence is the dark trail they left on her cheeks from the mascara streaking.

  
Sam thinks she has finally realized the importance and the meaning of death, that instrument through which she can gain a perspective on life; a trying time in which she can assert the meaning of what she has accomplished so far and what she wishes her future to be like. Mortality makes her face herself - the only true judge of her choices. And though it's painful, and she wishes her father didn't have to die for her to be enlightened, she is glad the teaching comes at such a pivotal point in her life.


End file.
